Letter from Lithuania

Letter from Lithuania

While fellow Baltic state Estonia is racked with pain about its links with the Soviet regime, quiet Lithuania has been getting on with its business, welcoming tourists in their thousands, although Vilnius, the capital, has only half a million inhabitants.

I have come to visit the ghosts of my ancestors. For several hundred years Vilnius was the world centre of Yiddish culture with, even in 1937, 16 newspapers and magazines, 100 synagogues as well as theatres, publishing houses and libraries.

Now where there was once a great cultural life, there is silence. Soviet rule in 1940 saw the deportations to Siberia of Lithuanians, Jews and Poles, so when Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, many "Litvaks" imagined that their redeemer had come. They were wrong of course. Mass executions of Jews occurred in the nearby Paneriai Forest. At a stroke a great civilisation, without which Vilnius may never have been remarkable, was destroyed.

The Museum of Genocide presents the Lithuanian people as a homogenous group, not mentioning what happened to Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Turkics or other such undesirable minorities. The emphasis is on the brutality of the USSR: the cells in the basement include an execution room where reminders of tortured humanity have deliberately been left in place - glasses, shoes, bits of clothing. A padded cell prevented prisoners' cries of anguish from reaching anyone's ears.

In preparation for its role as European City of Culture 2009, Vilnius is already practising with spontaneous open-air music days where anyone who can sing, whistle or play an instrument is encouraged to come out into the street and show off.

A little gang of young female musicians suddenly find themselves useful accompanists to a wedding party where the bridesmaids are dressed in shocking red and the bride and groom are more than happy to do a turn for the gathering crowd. My parents were from these parts. Having left for Australia the day after their arranged wedding in 1937, they always spoke of this city with longing and reverence, but the scars of leaving behind their nearest and dearest never left them.